


Hindsight

by westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Original Character - Freeform, Pre-White House (West Wing)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-05-01
Updated: 2003-05-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 06:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15113591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist/pseuds/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist
Summary: "He says that's why Lisa and I didn't work out - because it was a rebound and trying to re-create my marriage, which would account for the ring, I suppose..."





	Hindsight

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**Hindsight**  
**by:** Kasey

**Character(s):** Sam  
**Category(s):** ESF, S/LS, S/Other, Pastfic, references to S/J Friendship, much angst and torture  
**Rating:** TEEN  
**Disclaimer:** Don't own them, go figure, this is just a crazy little sad fic I came up with and it won't leave me alone 'til I write it. Unbetaed, so ignore the little mistakes please. Don't think there are any, but could be.  
**Summary:** "He says that's why Lisa and I didn't work out - because it was a rebound and trying to re-create my marriage, which would account for the ring, I suppose..."  


Y'know, I honestly am not sure why Lisa and I were ever engaged? It's not like we felt some pressing need to, it's not like things were going that well, nor is it like proposing was some last-ditch effort of mine to try and save the relationship. Things when I proposed were...they were passable, they were the same as they usually were between us, which wasn't saying much positive. 

I'm not even sure what exactly made Lisa and I get together in the first place... you'd think I'd remember, but I don't...We just sort of...coexisted in the same bedroom, leading our two separate lives outside of the apartment and trying to be a couple once inside. So it was destined to fail. 

Josh to this day thinks it was a rebound. He says that's why Lisa and I didn't work out - because it was a rebound and trying to re-create my marriage, which would account for the ring, I suppose. 

He never liked Lisa, not at all. He thought she was vindictive and overly critical of me...Josh, on the other hand, was overly protective. It wasn't entirely his fault - Ellen told him to watch out for me, and he took that very seriously. He still does. 

I remember exactly what attracted me to Ellen, though...there were a lot of things, actually, it wasn't like it was just her eyes - I mean her eyes were part of it, but...She was so smart and her eyes lit up when she was excited and her hair was so soft and she was just this...amazing person. I met her when I was a freshman in high school, and she was a sophomore so that alone was a bit taboo but we were in a lot of the same classes. We were high school sweethearts, then we went to Princeton where we were college sweethearts, and then we got married. A month after graduation, in a big ceremony back home in California before we moved to ----- Carolina. Her father walked her down the aisle in his full dress uniform - he was a decorated Army General - and she had the most gorgeous dress...And my mother cried and I almost did but not quite. 

Then it was off to Duke to get settled in. She could've gone for another degree, but she was happy with her Bachelor's in Political Science - she wanted to get out there and start working. She used to always say-... 

...She always-...she used to tell me life was too short to just sit around in a classroom. That life was too short to not get out and do things. 

Yeah, well, life was just plain too short for her. Books or no books. 

She started working for state senators, and she fit in more than I did because she was a little more conservative than I was, and more religious --not fanatical, but enough for her to get by in the Bible Belt and the New South. Even so, she had to prove a lot that she wasn't some Southern Belle, what with her long blonde hair and innocent brown eyes. 

That facade didn't hold up if you knew her - she was tough on those who disagreed with her, on those who tried to take her for granted. And yet, at the same time...she was fanatical about home, about our home, about her dorm back at Princeton...she said it was because she'd moved so much as a kid, being the Army brat that she was... 

That first year, by the time she'd get home from work and I'd get home from the law library, we were both so exhausted that I honestly don't think we ate dinner together more than once a week. But we didn't mind - we were just starting out and things were...not perfect, but damn good. 

In October of my third year of law school, she started getting sick. It wasn't much, y'know, just a flu she couldn't seem to shake. I took her to the doctor a couple days after Halloween...and I think to this day I have yet to have a happier moment in my life. I mean that and our wedding day are just about tied. 

See, you were probably thinking she was getting sick with something deadly - by the fact that I refer to her in the past tense and with sadness, and I said she was getting sick and that's usually when someone would start talking about some rare tropical disease caused when someone is bitten by a rare bug on the second Thursday after a full moon when above seventy degrees latitude or something. 

No, see...it was nothing like that. 'Cause that day in early November was when we found out she was gonna have a baby. 

I was in the middle of my semestre at Georgetown, working part-time as a Congressional Aide while she was the Deputy Chief of Staff to Earl Brennan, I'd just met Josh Lyman for the first time, and I was... How could life get better? I had a best friend, a beautiful wife, a job I loved, and I was about to be a dad... 

We must've talked for hours upon hours every night of what we would name it and did we wanna know the sex beforehand and what would its room look like and what would *it* look like and all those things you wonder before you become parents... 

...Except she was never around to find out most of those things. 

It was the week before finals. I was living in the Duke Law Library, studying for my last finals *ever* and just hoping I wouldn't fail them all, the apartment was mostly packed so we could move back to DC after my graduation, Ellen was not quite eight months pregnant, and she realized late one evening that she wanted ice cream - I wasn't home to get it for her, and she was incredibly independent in that she didn't want to come bother me just for a carton of ice cream she could get from the grocery store down the street. She got into the car-... 

...She got into the car because her ankles bothered her if she walked too much anymore, and she drove down the street and was turning left on a green arrow when the car didn't stop for the red light. 

It took them almost two hours to find me. It was 1991, hardly anyone had cell phones, and especially not college students in a law library... 

I got there just as her stats started dropping enough that they had to deliver the baby THEN or the baby would die for sure...they didn't add the word "too" onto the end of that sentence, but I could hear it in their voices. They made me leave the room, and I sat on a bench right outside the door until I heard the shrill cry of a baby... 

...She was so tiny...but they said well-developed enough that there wouldn't be too many complications, and she could breathe on her own. 

They asked what her name was, and at first I had to ask who they meant - the baby or Ellen. They meant our daughter...and I said Jessica, because that's what Ellen and I had decided we'd call the baby if it was a girl. But I changed the middle name, which was gonna be Samantha (as per Ellen's insistence). 

The name on her birth certificate is Jessica Eleanor Seaborn. I think they literally filled it out at the same time that Ellen died. 

You're probably expecting one of these heroic stories, of how I managed to pull myself together because I had our daughter to raise, and she ended up being a physicist or something amazing, because I taught her all her mother would've wanted me to teach her. 

Hah. Save that ending for a Lifetime Original Movie. 

I'd had doubts before about being a dad - every guy has them, I think, just like every woman gets paranoid about her ability to be a mother...but trying to overcome those doubts on your own, when you're trying to overcome the death of the woman you've loved for over ten years...I-...I mean Jess would cry and I'd just stand there, not knowing what the hell to do... 

After a couple weeks of watching my horrible efforts to be a father, my Mom put it to me as such: I had to get my act together, or our daughter would end up dying, too. I just-...I couldn't, I didn't know how to take care of myself anymore, let alone a baby...she was so tiny I was afraid I'd crush her...but there was no way I could do something like give her away, spend my whole life wondering whatever became of our daughter and of the only piece of Ellen I had left. 

In the end there was a compromise of sorts. And I'd like to be able to say I know for sure I did the right thing, but the truth is I really don't know...I wonder about it still, and that's been over 11 years. 

I still get to see Jess - on holidays, vacations, all family gatherings... 

I have a brother who's older than me by just under six years, and he and his wife had been trying for years to have a baby, but she couldn't, so...so now when Jess sees me, she calls me Uncle Sam - she thinks it's funny 'cause I work for the government and all that...plus that's what I am to her. As far as she knows, I'm her uncle and my brother's her dad, and she's been raised to know nothing different. 

Which is probably best for the poor kid - it's enough to give a person a complex worthy of a number of years in therapy. And Josh tells me I did about the only thing I could do - it took me long enough to get my own self back on track, it would've taken too long for me to be able to take care of Jessica, she would've died of neglect in the meantime. 

Lisa was...I dunno, I guess somehow in my mind the fact that I was able to be with someone and enjoy their company was good enough reason to marry 'em. I'd spent so long crying after Ellen died that being able to smile again seemed like the best thing in the world...they were about the same height, and Lisa wore her hair long when I met her, like Ellen had...At the time, that was enough to make me stand up and take notice, I guess, and enough to make me wanna spend the rest of my life with her. 

Bad theory, sure, but at the time... 

I mean, hindsight *is* 20/20. 


End file.
